USA Dot Com is a blog covering politics and government from a conservative Christian perspective. Verne Strickland is a 50-year veteran of investigative journalism. This blog offers a take-no-prisoners style with a modicum of biting satire. Verne and his wife of 55 years, Durrene, live in Wilmington, NC.

Friday, September 6, 2013

Verne Strickland / September 6, 2013
(SHAWN THEW/EPA)
“In the nearly 100 years since this global commitment against
chemical weapons was made, only two tyrants have dared to cross the
world’s brightest line. Bashar al-Assad has now become the third.”

Kerry's quote on 'a date that will live in infamy' rings hollow, lacks the eloquence of FDR's original

Secretary of State John Kerry borrowed Franklin
Delano Roosevelt's denunciation of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
to urge Congress to authorize a military strike on Syria following the
latest chemical weapons attack.

"That will be one of those moments in history that will live in
infamy," Kerry told the House Foreign Affairs Committee while discussing
the possibility that Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad escape an
international response to the most recent chemical weapons attack by his
regime during the Syrian civil war.

The "live in infamy" phrase comes from FDR's Pearl Harbor speech.
"Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the
United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by
naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan," Roosevelt said. "The
United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of
Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor
looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific."

Kerry said that refusing to strike Syria would stand along "some
of those moments" when the United States has done something worthy of
infamy. He compared it to the FDR administration's decision not to allow
Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany to come to the United States.

"In a highly publicized event in May–June 1939, the United States
refused to admit over 900 Jewish refugees who had sailed from Hamburg,
Germany, on the St. Louis.

The St. Louis appeared off
the coast of Florida shortly after Cuban authorities cancelled the
refugees' transit visas and denied entry to most of the passengers, who
were still waiting to receive visas to enter the United States," the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains in its history of the event.

"Denied permission to land in the United States, the ship was forced
to return to Europe. The governments of Great Britain, France, the
Netherlands, and Belgium each agreed to accept some of the passengers as
refugees.

Of the 908 St. Louis passengers who returned to Europe, 254
(nearly 28 percent) are known to have died in the Holocaust. 288
passengers found refuge in Britain. Of the 620 who returned to the
continent, 366 (just over 59 percent) are known to have survived the
war."

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Asking why anyone would vote Republican, Drudge listed his
grievances: "Raised taxes; marching us off to war again; approved more
NSA snooping. WHO ARE THEY?!"

Published September 05, 2013

FoxNews.com

Drudge Report founder Matt Drudge is shown in this 1997 file photo.

AP Internet pioneer Matt Drudge may have had enough of the Republican Party.

Though known to needle the GOP and its leaders from time to time, the
founder of Drudge Report let loose over the party's direction on
Twitter this week.

Asking why anyone would vote Republican, Drudge listed his
grievances: "Raised taxes; marching us off to war again; approved more
NSA snooping. WHO ARE THEY?!"

His tweets referred to Republican leaders, like House Speaker John
Boehner, getting behind the president's military-strike push in Syria
and other positions. But Drudge's comments also touched on the broader
internal fight in the party.
Or as Drudge put it: "It's now Authoritarian vs. Libertarian. Since
Democrats vs. Republicans have been obliterated, no real differences
between parties."

But Drudge's recent tweets are hardly the first time he's gotten in the middle of Republican Party infighting.

In January 2012, conservative Republicans accused him of catering to
the GOP establishment and said he used his influential site as a virtual
soap box for presidential candidate Mitt Romney. They were upset that
he had taken repeated swipes at candidate Newt Gingrich.

Some fans openly questioned whether Drudge, once the darling of the
conservative right, had become an enemy to the "cause" and accused him
of using his digital real estate to push a more mainstream
message. Politico wrote at the time, "Newt Gingrich better hope voters
who lapped up his delicious hits on the 'elite media' and liberals don't
read the Drudge Report this morning ... If they do, Gingrich comes off
looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud."

Known for its never-changed spartan look, Drudge Report has become
one of the most powerful drivers of political news in the country. The
headlines trend toward news that interests conservative readers the
most, but news outlets of all stripes relish a link on the heavily
trafficked site -- and check it regularly.

According to a May 2011 Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence
in Journalism study, Drudge is an "extremely important traffic driver."

"In other words, the Drudge Report's influence cuts across both
traditional organizations such as ABC News to more tabloid style outlets
such as the New York Post," the study found. "What's more, Drudge
Report drove more links than Facebook or Twitter on all the sites to
which it drove traffic."

Drudge Report started off as an online news group in the '90s. Its
break-out moment came in 1998, when it out-scooped Newsweek on its own
story. Drudge reported that the national magazine had information on the
inappropriate relationship between then-President Clinton and former
White House intern Monica Lewinsky but was sitting on it.

Newsweek
published the story after Drudge's report came out.
Not known for his tact, Drudge has been repeatedly slammed by the left for sensationalizing news.

Yet earlier this year, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hailed Drudge as a "news media innovator" who should be applauded.

Assange claimed that Drudge made his name by "publishing information
that the establishment media would not. It is as a result of the
self-censorship of the establishment press in the United States that
gave Matt Drudge such a platform and so of course he should be applauded
for breaking a lot of that censorship."